


on the wings of a nightingale

by focusfixated



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Biting, Breathplay, Hair-pulling, M/M, Multiple Orgasms, Needles, Pain Kink, Porn with Feelings, Praise Kink, Restraining, Service Top Crowley (Good Omens), Tattoos, Touch-Starved, bodies (non-celestial), heartbeats are a metaphor, when you're an ex-catholic and it shows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:01:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23144350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/focusfixated/pseuds/focusfixated
Summary: Aziraphale liked his body. He liked the shape of it, the way it moved and touched the world, an implement for contact, for earthliness, for awareness. It was why he liked being near humans, near their smells and their sounds, shaking hands and rubbing shoulders; a type of sensory feedback that made him understand the shape and extent of his corporation, the way it reacted, how it pushed back when it was pulled. Like he wasn’t just an ephemeral vessel. Like he was flesh.Or: Aziraphale gets a tattoo. Crowley is an accessory to this crime against good sense. Everyone’s kinks are very poorly disguised.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 100
Kudos: 351





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes you just think, what if i wrote aziraphale getting a tattoo? and then 11k words later you’ve written a whole personally-revealing treatise on the experience of touch and a lot of emotional pornography. 
> 
> content warnings: there are detailed descriptions of needles and references to blood during the scene in the tattoo parlour. it's more clinical and not very graphic, but heed the warning if that kind of thing bothers you. 
> 
> thank you as ever to my dearest [koritsimou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/koritsimou/pseuds/koritsimou), who helped with the choreography.
> 
> title is from the Everly Brothers song.

**CHAPTER ONE**

It was an ordinary, mild Tuesday afternoon in the living room of a modestly-sized Tudor-style cottage nestled between a stony brook, and a stretch of grassy tussocks somewhere in East Sussex.

Aziraphale, Ex-Guardian of the Eastern Gate, and Antony J. Crowley, Retired Demon, were sitting in relative silence together, a comfortable blanket of quiet settled over them interrupted only by the occasional rustle of a turning page and the shift of toes over a quilted throw-pillow. The exact date was irrelevant, but, as close as can be estimated, it was early autumn, sometime during the mid-to-late 2010s – an era that would later be historically defined for its acute sense of both nostalgia and foreboding, and an overall lack of decorum when it came to properly labelling things – and the pair were spending a pleasant and, so far, unremarkable afternoon together.

Then Aziraphale closed his book with a dusty snap and said, “What would you think if I decided to get a tattoo?”

Crowley blinked. “That seems. Uncharacteristic.”

“Well. It’s something new to try, isn’t it? Update _this_ old thing.” Aziraphale waved at himself, encompassing his general appearance; his beige and parchmenty fustiness; the century-worn folds in his jacket and slacks, all precise repetitions; the neat, tight curls on his head, largely unchanged since the concept of hair styling was first invented.

Crowley scratched the back of his head. His own hair was currently shorn tight and close to his skull, a bristly buzzcut that Aziraphale had run a hand over, curiously, after Crowley had first revealed it. It was surprisingly soft, and the short strands shifted minutely under his palm like the fibres in velvet cloth. It was the first time Crowley had ever worn such short hair, though he was no stranger to changing his appearance over the years to suit the whims of his shifting moods. Still— “You’re fine as you are,” he said, now. “Besides, an _angel_? With a tattoo? Whoever heard of such a thing?”

Aziraphale felt a little vexed. “ _You_ have them.”

Crowley skimmed a thumb up his temple, where his marks stood vivid against his skin, the inkiness of it as clear as the first day Aziraphale had laid eyes on him. “I’m a demon,” he said, like that was reason enough. Then his mouth twisted to the side. “And I didn't choose them.”

“You could always get a new one. One you chose yourself.”

“No thanks,” Crowley scoffed. “Ridiculous custom, anyway – humans getting drunk, or besotted with each other and spending money to get some awful, tacky thing tattooed on their bumcheeks that they immediately regret and have to spend _more_ money on to get covered up.”

“Well, I don't know about _that_ ,” Aziraphale argued, propelled, as always, by an unfailing urge to dispense unasked-for information. “For many communities, tattooing is an extremely important and respected cultural art. The _Tā Moko_ in Māori culture, for example—”

“Yes, I _know_ , we both spent that decade in Aotearoa,” Crowley interrupted, arms crossed, curled and defensive as a woodlouse. “But neither of us are indigenous human Polynesians, or indigenous human anythings, last time I checked, so I'm pretty sure cultural practices are irrelevant in this case. I just don’t understand the _appeal_ of something like that for – well.” He uncrossed his arms and gestured broadly at Aziraphale. “Someone like you.”

“Is it so awful that I might just find it interesting to find out what it feels like?" Aziraphale said, shrugging.

There was a short silence that felt loaded, although Aziraphale hadn’t intended it to be, nor had he expected Crowley’s face to smooth blankly over like that, inscrutable for a few moments before he asked, “Why?”

“I – I don’t know,” Aziraphale said, although he expected he probably _might_ know, if he dug a little deeper into his thoughts. He paused, rubbing the side of his nose, the itchiness of embarrassment – the most frustratingly debilitating of all the human habits he’d picked up over time – prickling at him.

“It sounds like it would be awfully painful if one were to go about it without miracles,” Crowley said, neutrally enough, though his eyes were fixed and calculating.

Aziraphale had an idea of how Crowley felt about pain – not physical pain, necessarily; they were easily able to bypass the anatomical laws that dictated the need for nerve endings and nociceptors, if they wanted to. But _metaphysical_ pain, the torture of a soul, the chasmic encasing darkness of disembodied hurt and abandonment – the kind of pain that was abstract and supernatural but stretched on in an interminable, devastating echo throughout all time – that was something that Crowley carried with him constantly, and would forever, for as long as existence _was_.

Aziraphale, on the other hand, had lived for a soft, vacant eternity, suspended in infinite white light, surrounded and filled by an unboundaried warmth which had no end and no beginning. There was no pain, because there was nothing there but a cosmic vacuum. When Aziraphale had come to earth, it was the first time he'd ever felt what it was to be embodied, to feel the limit of things, to feel their edges; where something started and ended; how one action could cause a distinct reaction, even at the smallest, atomic level; how everything that was pushed could also push back. It was a revelation.

Aziraphale remembered the light sand-grit layer that covered his skin, in Mesopotamia, back in the BC 3000s. He could _feel_ it, the way the wind whipped up the desert and how the elements danced together, tugging at him, and he remembered the elation that came from his connection to the earth, the way even the untouchable wind was touching him, somehow.

In the European towns and cities of the late 1340s, there had been a distinct plagueyness going around that had put a dampener on things, but there were also close-dark taverns with flickering firelight that put you shoulder-to-shoulder with hard-edged humans that emanated a kind of raw simplicity that he had basked in. One time a brigand caught Aziraphale by surprise, exiting one such establishment and jostling him roughly to snatch his purse – the sense of genuine danger was distant to Aziraphale who had miracles at his fingertips for these sorts of small transgressions, but he remembered the way he was pushed, head knocking into a brick wall, the flash of an unused knife, glinting with potential violence at the man’s hip. Aziraphale had run his fingers over the place where his head connected with the wall for days afterwards, not afraid, but marvelling.

France in 1789 brought him memories of a different kind of feeling – he had spent the century acquiring softness and finery, lace and silks and satins, chasing pleasurable sensations in the food he ate, cream cakes and sweet brioche. When he was caught during his pursuit of crêpes in Paris, unaware (and obtusely so) of the social upheaval happening all over the city, the potential for serious consequences was clearer in his mind than it had ever previously been. But rather than feeling mired in despair, Aziraphale had revelled in the strange anxious twist that happened, unbidden, in his belly, and the thrilling swoop on the tail of the sensation when Crowley turned up in his cell. It was like his internal organs, for all their logistical uselessness, were making themselves known to him; as if he weren't just an ephemeral vessel, but flesh, of sorts, and when he felt things, his body responded, with prickles of sweat and butterfly-like feelings in his gut, like he was full, and real, and embodied.

After a moment, Aziraphale said, carefully, “I mean, it’s part of the range, isn’t it? The pain.” He dug a nail into the side of his knuckle, and it twinged. “The range of what we - _they_ \- could be capable of enduring.”

Crowley made a face. “Sounds suspiciously like self-flagellation nonsense to me. You know how I feel about all that demonstrative penitence humans go in for. Doesn't make a lick of difference to their souls and messes up a lot of perfectly nice corporations.”

“It's not supposed to be a punishment, Crowley. It's a nice thing, nowadays. And _I_ think they're rather fetching...”

“Yes, okay," Crowley said, though his face was still a little suspicious. “I suppose if it’s important to you. And – I mean, it’s your body. You only get the one. Mix-ups with the Antichrist aside. You can do what you want.” He sat up, toes slipping free of the coverlet to flex against the carpeted floor. His legs always seemed to go on much longer than expected, knees bent up to his chest, not enough room on the sofa for the quantity of limb he wielded. He paused, cutting Aziraphale a sideways look. “Anyway, I’m going to turn in.”

“Alright.” Aziraphale’s finger slipped out from between the pages of the book he’d stopped reading. Its spine was still slightly bowed from the impression it left behind. “I’m going to read for a little while longer.”

Crowley stood. He looked like he wanted to say something, but his mouth pressed closed. Instead he reached out and squeezed Aziraphale’s shoulder, then he padded on silent, bare feet out of the room.

Aziraphale opened his book again. Unthinking, he placed a hand on his shoulder, and rested it there, fingers slotted into the ghost of a touch.

\---

Aziraphale had first experienced what it was to _feel_ back in The Beginning, in the Garden, when the command was issued for the ephemeral, transcendent, fire-blazing gyre of his holy spirit to be doused, compressed, and squeezed like a lemon in an electric juicer into flesh.

The wings were still there – they bristled as he stretched – but the pulsating overspill of miasmic eldritch energy was, for now, restrained by a normal amount of human eyes, and things like hips and a chest cavity. A belly. Fingers and toes.

His awakening was novel enough, having never done so previously due to a lack of human eyes or eyelids or a need for sleep. When his eyes did open – two of them only, now, vision tunnelled into a singular direction – he found that he was surrounded by lush and bountiful things that were, also for the first time, made of _stuff_. Tangible matter. They had edges and curves and took up space in the air; air that was no longer a big fathomless nothing, but an atmosphere created of close-packed, invisible atoms that took up space, too. Aziraphale reached up to touch his own cheek, where the wind whispered against him.

He walked the garden, alone, for a while – this aloneness strange in its novelty too, his spirit newly-isolated and boundaried and _contained_. He touched the things in the garden, words for them coming to mind from elsewhere: fruits, trees, grass, ferns, rocks, mud. His feet sank with every step into wet, fertile earth, a soft, sucking petrification of matter, blooming squelchfully between his toes.

He walked and walked, until he reached the edge of the Garden. And there, in a place slightly hidden by toppled rocks, cast into a shade more darkness than the rest, was something else. It was a plant of a kind, somehow unlovely and set apart from its kin, a cautious thing, gnarled and thick-stemmed, lacking any flowers or buds, and covered instead in sharpened, inch-long thorns.

“What's this?” Aziraphale murmured, the sound of his voice entering the atmosphere for the very first time, a strange disturbance in the air that mingled with birdsong and the whistle of the wind through high-branched trees. He reached out, like he had done countless times that day, to touch the newness of what he had discovered, to find out what it felt like. He pressed his fingers against a thorn, and then drew back. He looked at his fingertips, and saw the pricked holes there, a tear in the very fabric of him, blooming red and vital on the surface of his skin. It stung – or a word like that – in a bright-sharp needlepoint of feeling on the edge of him that travelled somehow to his core, pathways along his nerves blinking with signals to his mind that peaked with a surprising intensity.

Aziraphale let out a breath. He looked around himself. No one else was there, and no explanation for the phenomenon was forthcoming from his own knowledge. Fascinated, he reached out to touch the thorns again.

\---

“It’s not too late to back out, you know. Cancellation fees don’t apply to the occult.”

Aziraphale pursed his lips. The leather of the waiting room sofa creaked behind him. “Are you here to support me, or to make unhelpful comments?”

“Well, I’m certainly _here_.” Crowley slouched further into his own side of the cracked black leather sofa of the tattoo parlour in their old Soho haunt. “Facilitating your ridiculous whims. An accessory to this crime against good sense.” There was a laminated book of generic tattoo designs on the low, chipped coffee table in front of them. A cursory look had shown it was filled with images of upside-down crucifixes surrounded by thorned roses on fire, and toothy skulls sprouting ragged angel wings in a rather mixed-up and jumble of iconography. In their blasphemy, humans really did the most _creative_ things.

“Mr. – uh. Mr. Fell?” A woman approached them from the open parlour, from the direction of the constant, low-grade buzzing and sharp, inky smell that wafted towards them. She had an exploded bomb’s worth of shrapnel in various configurations in her face, and was holding a form on a clipboard.

“Oh, that’s me.” Aziraphale hopped up. “Yes, I’m here for my tattoo.”

“I’m here against my will,” Crowley said, stonily.

The woman’s face – the parts of it Aziraphale could see in between all the metal – did something clumsy as she tried to school the expression that crept over her as she took in Aziraphale, and the whole bow-tied, buttoned-up, middle-aged, middle-class-looking fussiness of him. Then her gaze moved over to Crowley, and Aziraphale saw her relax fractionally, like something logical had slotted back into her worldview. “I like your face tats,” she said to him. “Where’d you get them done?”

Crowley bared his teeth. “ _Hell_.”

The woman clicked her tongue, thinking. “You mean the studio in Peckham?”

Crowley’s smirk was snake-sharp. “Further down than that.”

“Croydon?”

“You’re getting warmer.”

“My dear,” Aziraphale interrupted with a steely smile, “I have the reference image you asked for. For my tattoo.” Then, with the odd sensation of falling unstoppably downwards without wings, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small, square image of a little bird.

Half an hour later, Aziraphale was settled in the tattooist’s chair, shirt off, his back making creaky, rubbery noises against the tacky leather backrest as Becky, the tattooist, needled a nightingale into the space on his chest just above his heart.

“Of course, this is all very much against God’s teachings, isn’t it?” Crowley was saying. “Thou shalt not make any cuttings in thy flesh, and all that. Sullying the temple. Very compelling Biblical arguments against the whole practice.” He jerked his chin at all the heavily-tattooed people wandering around them, covered in markings. “Pretty sure it's a sin, Old Testament-wise.”

The noise from Becky’s needle halted for a second. She shifted her gaze over to where Crowley had grabbed Aziraphale's hand as soon as the needle started buzzing, and then wordlessly and politely went back to what she was doing. Aziraphale bit his lip to hide a smile.

“Not to mention the vanity, of course,” Crowley continued, insistently.

Becky spritzed a paper towel with disinfectant and wiped it over Aziraphale’s chest to remove the excess ink, blood, and sticky clear plasma that was leaking out of the open puncture wounds in his skin. It was all rather anatomical, visceral, and Aziraphale was thrilled by the whole process. His current corporation _did_ operate on a network of veins and capillaries, blood being a necessary component of many a ritual and sacrament, so it was something of a requirement to have it. He wasn’t, however, required to carry all the other complicated human necessities like the cells that fought infection if wounds were sustained, or the collagen that knitted the cuts back together. He was already befitted with an inbuilt, ultra-fast, infallible healing system (namely waving a hand over the whole mess and disappearing it), so it wasn't really necessary.

Their bodies, such as they were, tended to work only insofar as the angel inhabiting it understood it to. Body parts appeared or disappeared when necessary or useful, and things like breathing or bruising only occurred if the angel in question felt it relevant to the situation, though these effects were rarely in direct corollary, in human terms, to what ought to have caused them. Case in point – Aziraphale’s heart was mostly a formality, and didn’t, in effect, work, or _need_ to work at all. Still, sometimes he found it starting up a rhythm, unbidden, of its own accord, without any logical, physical trigger. He'd noticed, cautiously, over a span of six thousand years or so, that it was almost always around Crowley that this happened, though not necessarily for the same reasons every time. Sometimes it was because Aziraphale was in a fond, affectionate mood. Sometimes it was because he was frightened, or confused and angry by something Crowley had done. Sometimes it was just because Crowley had looked at him without his glasses on. Aziraphale’s heart would begin a cautious rhythm, speeding up or slowing down depending on the context of the situation, but always with an implacable _ache_ underneath.

There was no anatomical reasoning for it, but Aziraphale had spent the better part of six thousand years observing human behaviour and reading their poetry – he understood the significance of metaphor.

Aziraphale was also able to understand physical pain, and to experience it, if he wanted. From the moment Becky had first tapped the needle to the human-thin epidermis of his chest, he expected it to hurt – _wanted_ it to, really – and so therefore it did. He’d taken in a sharp breath, then hissed it out through his teeth, and felt a tremblingly volatile feeling shudder through him, something that was both weakening and invigorating, a sharp, searing heat of raw pain, and a cold, stomach-bottoming swoop of adrenaline that made gooseflesh stand out on his arms. The needle pierced only the uppermost layers of skin, of course, but somehow Aziraphale could feel the resonance of the needle like it was going all the way through past his ribs, to his spine, into the very bones of him. It was fascinating. He could feel sweat on his brow, a reaction to the effort he was putting in to keep still under the dual impulses to tug away – a natural instinct towards self-preservation engrained in the format of the human skin he had – but also to go deeper underneath it all, to swim down into the depths of sensation, the encompassing rawness of it, to give in fully to the sense of _feeling_.

“You’re one to talk about vanity,” Aziraphale said, his voice wobbling slightly on account of the way his blood was rushing about his body, unused to doing so. “You’re positively indecent with accoutrements.”

“I’m _allowed_ to be indecent, angel, it’s rather my MO. You, on the other hand—” Crowley gave him a glance over, hidden by his dark glasses, but Aziraphale felt the movement of his eyes all the same, skimming across his shoulders and chest and his belly, all bare but for the unbuttoned shirt that crumpled around his waist. They rarely had reason to be unclothed around each other once _clothes-on_ had historically become the de facto state of being out and about in society. Garments were something that for them could be miracled on or off, and nudity was therefore only ever fleeting and rarely necessary, but Aziraphale found he rather liked Crowley’s eyes on him like this. He felt unpeeled, opened up, sharpened. It was a bit like the needle in his skin, without the resultant bleeding, but with the same sort of thrill.

“Right, we’re all done here,” Becky cut in, giving Aziraphale a final wipe down with antiseptic. “Go on, have a look in the mirror.”

Aziraphale hopped up, an unusual shakiness to his legs, which he assumed was on account of the adrenaline that had kicked in, the fight-or-flight response of a body in pain that had to be wrestled into submission, told to stay still, to push back from the threshold and endure. The needle had stopped, but he was still buzzing.

On his chest, below his collarbone and just over his heart, in its logical location on the left-hand side, a grey-shaded and soft-edged nightingale stood watch. How something that had been brought into being with such violence could look as delicate as brushstrokes was astounding. Another one of those paradoxes humans seemed to be able to hold, two opposing truths at once. His hand hovered, but didn’t touch. “Becky,” he said, with a wide smile, ear to ear. “It’s wonderful.”

Becky snapped her latex gloves off, the fingers of them black-stained. “Glad you like it, mate. It looks good on you!”

“Do you think so?” Aziraphale turned his head and arched his back a little, trying to catch the bird from a different angle. It shone, pinpricks of blood still welling up on raw skin, and it felt hot and tight where it bedded into him, like a burnt brand. It was painful, and lovely.

Aziraphale glanced out of the corner of his eye at Crowley. Crowley was looking at him, fixed and still behind his glasses, but when he saw Aziraphale looking back he jerked his gaze away, and out of the window.

\---

Aziraphale’s nightingale underwent a rather messy healing process that could easily have been expedited via a quick miracle, but Aziraphale had insisted on letting the whole thing happen naturally, itchy scabbing and all. It was now a stark black-and-grey image on his skin, indiscernible from the rest of him save for the faintly raised lines you only noticed when running fingers over it, which Aziraphale couldn’t help doing often, slipping a hand inside the unbuttoned top of his shirt to find by sense-touch the place where the bird began and ended. It had been, over the weeks, a calm point of focus for Aziraphale, a grounding pull away from the jitters that crept up on him, unannounced, during those strange days when he felt elusively restless.

“Stop _fiddling_ , Aziraphale,” Crowley said, not looking up from his slouch-backed position on the sofa, phone in hand as he did Lord only knew what on the infernal device.

Aziraphale, sitting next to him, caught red-handed, _hmm_ -ed loftily and extricated his fingers from inside his shirt. “I was only checking.”

“Checking what? That it’s not flown away?”

“If it’s healed over.”

“And?”

“It seems so.”

“Praise the Lord,” Crowley drawled. “If I had to listen to your complaining about the itchiness any longer…” He snapped his flip-phone shut, the snazzy bejewelled cover catching the late afternoon light. It played over his face, ruby and russet and blood-bright tones, a pleasing aesthetic set against the orange-gold leaf-fall outside their window. “So?”

“So?”

“ _So_ , is all that done with, now? Or are you planning a couple of piercings to match? A belly-button ring? Reckon that would be fetching and all.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Aziraphale said, smiling.

“You have _not_.” Crowley peered at him, suspicious.

“Perhaps, perhaps not.”

Crowley turned his phone over in his hands. It was about fifteen years out of date, and hadn’t been charged or even switched on properly for ten of those, but it still worked, because Crowley continued to expect it to. “Is it – out of your system, then?”

“Is what out of my system?”

“This tattoo business. Your fascination with humans and their quirky little interest in getting needles stuck in themselves for fun.”

“I suppose so.” Aziraphale didn’t tell Crowley how he still pressed his hand against the skin to see if he could feel the strange vicious heat that had emanated from it when it was first put there, pushing at it to chase the flare of soreness. He didn’t think he could succumb to addiction in a physical sense like humans did, since his body didn’t process chemicals in the classic human way – he’d had a very natty pipe back in the 1800s through which he’d smoked a heavy, tar-thick and deeply pungent tobacco, but as fashions changed, he hadn’t desired to keep it up, and hadn’t felt compelled to. But he did wonder, the longer he spent on earth, the more grooves he repeatedly mapped out across the part of him that existed in this dimension, with a real brain and real neural pathways, if other, psychological addictions might be affecting him.

Aziraphale had always enjoyed _feeling_. He liked eating food, the varying textures of it, myriad tastes, all operating on different rough-bud sections of his tongue. He liked wearing clothes, fanciful things of lace and satin, animal skins in the places and times it was acceptable, velvet and silk in places they were not, weighty reams of fabric rustling against his skin, buttons and bows and fussy little fastenings on his shirts or stockings, depending on the fashion, always just tight enough to hold him snugly. He liked his body. He liked the shape of it, the way it moved and touched the world, an implement for contact, for earthliness, for awareness. It was why he liked being near humans, near their smells and their sounds, shaking hands and rubbing shoulders; a type of sensory feedback that made him understand the shape and extent of his corporation, the way it reacted, how it pushed back when it was pulled.

It was the same way he felt about his faith in God. Aziraphale had never liked the kind of equable, angelic placidness perpetuated by HQ On High - that bland, bovine temperance that looked like nothing, tasted like nothing, felt like nothing. He had found faith was a flame that flared strongest when tested, enraged and giddy, when he had to throw the strength of his belief against question and doubt and scepticism, a malevolent force that he thrashed against, the staunchness of his faith turned into a battering ram, or a sword. Those were the moments when he could _feel_ the shape of his faith, fierce shards of it driving up through the woollen blanket-mass of piousness and affability, a feeling that felt like it was _made_ of something, like it was solid and graspable, like he could reach in and pull it from inside his chest, or else feel it pierce him from the inside out.

This was, he knew now, the reason Crowley had always delighted him. How perfect, he had thought back then, to find an enemy, a nemesis, someone to test him, to push him, to worry him with questions and doubts and knowingly raised eyebrows when Aziraphale’s fallacious logic fell apart like frayed, wet string, and forced him instead to dig into his reserves of faith; the hardened stuff, like layers of calcified stone, igneous rock blistered by the heat of holy fire in his heart and chest and belly; the stuff that always hurt a little as he dug his fingers in, strangely, pleasantly so.

Crowley was looking down at his screen, so Aziraphale let his hand drift back into his shirt, and pressed it over his heart. The skin didn’t feel much different to normal, but the organ underneath it was fluttering, a sensation that travelled to the tips of his fingers in cold, tacky anticipation.

“Stop it.”

Aziraphale jumped a little, guilty. “What?”

“Touching. You’re not supposed to touch it. Let it be.”

Aziraphale blew out a breath. “It’s fine. I’m not bothering anyone.”

“You’re bothering me.”

“Well, then stop looking.”

“Stop wriggling around, then.”

“I’m not!”

“You are, you keep—” Crowley flicked a hand over at Aziraphale. “Molesting yourself.”

Aziraphale’s face made a wide, interrupted O of low outrage. “I am doing nothing of the sort.”

“I’m just _asking_ —” and on this, Crowley sat up from his slouch, and leaned over towards Aziraphale, “—you to stop fiddling—” he grabbed Aziraphale’s wrist, pulled it out and away from his chest, “—for just five minutes.” He pulled Aziraphale’s hand down, so it was laid down just on the valleyed dip of sofa cushions between them, his long fingers encircling the diameter of Aziraphale’s wrist, closing finger to thumb tightly around him.

Immediately, as if it were utterly beyond his control, in a reactive, anatomical flare-up of feeling, Aziraphale’s pulse snapped to attention, a little thrust of protest against its strangulation, and he felt himself melt like a pool of butter, joyful and warm. “ _Oh_ ,” he said out loud, in a drawn-out breath so overcome he had to snap his mouth closed in shock and embarrassment.

There was silence in the room for a moment, thick and filling and present in its weight. Minutes passed, blurred and thin like a sheet of frosted glass with something uncertain and ambiguous on the other side of it. And then, just when Aziraphale felt he could speak again, and inhaled to say something, Crowley straightened up and started to pull his hand away.

“No,” Aziraphale said quickly, and felt himself grow warmer. It was embarrassing, how much his reactions were getting away from him. Symptoms of embarrassment were manifesting themselves all over the place – red flush high on his cheeks, prickling sweat cooling under his arms and under his knees – but it was also thrilling, to feel his body react without his say-so, little firing supernovas of feeling under his skin. “Could you – stay?”

Crowley was quiet a moment, and then, “Alright,” he said, and in a strangely elegant, confident gesture, he slid his index finger further around Aziraphale’s wrist, holding him firm in the L-shape of his thumb, before closing the gap again, closer and tighter to Aziraphale’s skin. Without being asked, then, he squeezed, a contraction that Aziraphale could feel distinctly, the definitive solidity of Crowley’s bones folded around him. “Like this?” Crowley looked unsure.

“Yes. Please.”

They stayed on the sofa, Aziraphale encircled in Crowley’s grip, for a few moments longer, until Crowley squeezed a final time, and let go. It took Aziraphale’s heart much longer than usual to return to normal.


	2. Chapter 2

\---

Something deep and wanting had stirred in Aziraphale. He found himself distracted, alternately too-warm or shivering in his body at illogical times, wondering what exactly he was feeling, how to name it, what to do with it.

He started acting up, like a foolish, attention-seeking child, restlessly fidgeting or dropping things, leaving piles of scattered paper in the living room, tapping and drumming his fingers on the table at lunch, just hoping that Crowley would reach over to grab him, stop him, press against him and push him back into place again like he had the other day, scratch that itching flare-up of need that vibrated in him the way the tattooist’s needle had.

Crowley seemed to have noticed something had changed too, that there was a strange charge in the air. Over the next few weeks, he found his own reasons to touch, in subtly different ways to before – he would come up behind Aziraphale when he was reading, and push his nose into Aziraphale’s hair, rub his forehead to the back of Aziraphale’s neck, cat-like, before peeling away without a word. He would slide his feet over to Aziraphale’s side of the sofa, pushing with his toes at Aziraphale’s thighs, quirking a knowing, quick-flit smile when Aziraphale leaned into the press of it. He would give Aziraphale’s hips a squeeze when he helped Aziraphale put his coat on when they got ready to go out, fingers digging on the edge of too sharp, leaving phantom imprints Aziraphale couldn’t stop thinking about in the restaurant, hands ghosting down to his sides to slot into the impressions left there.

It was strange. Tender. Affecting. Confusing.

There was no question as to their feelings for each other, deep down, although words had not _technically,_ officially, been exchanged. Through the myriad rocky patches of their relationship over the years, words were often too trite or easily misunderstood. Both of them held within their collective memories the changing, malleable nature of language over time, a landmine-scattered desert of misinterpretations ready to trip them up and explode in their faces if the wrong thing was said. But the closeness of their connection was never in contestation. They had always been a pair, their whole lives – from strangers thrown together in a garden, to hereditary enemies, to cautious co-workers, to conspirators-in-arms, to partners at the edge of Armageddon.

But the shape and physical enactment of this changing relationship had not always been clear; the boundaries had been raised and skirted around, taken down and put back up, crossed over and reset, many times over many thousands of years. After the aborted Apocalypse, and the natural progression of their ‘understanding’, Aziraphale supposed he should be allowed to touch Crowley, fondly, as often as he liked, and Crowley had made no protest to hands on shoulders and fingers linked on coffee-shop tables. For his part, Crowley liked to hold hands too, when they walked in the village square, or took a trip for the weekend down to Soho, an unspoken gesture of peace, of acceptance, of being on their own side, together. It was something that filled Aziraphale with great joy.

But he was also aware, in a distant, unbothered sort of way, that they had never tried to demonstrate their feelings for each other by having sex, nor had they spoken about the subject much at all apart from vague allusions to past misdemeanours or temptations. Aziraphale hadn’t had it with anyone else, angel or demon, and the practice had never quite seemed right, morally, with humans. He had, however, chased the grounding, thrumming feeling of desire and being desired on more than one occasion, taking himself to bars and close-packed locations, ostensibly to spread goodness and blessings, but actually spending most of his time there revelling in the heady waves of want that always made his skin feel tight and present around him. It hadn’t been a shameful practice, per se, but it wasn’t something Aziraphale shouted about from the rooftops, either. It was private. Personal.

Aziraphale didn’t know if Crowley had had it. He hadn’t thought it polite to ask.

It was strange, that in all this time, there should still be something new for them to discover, new territory to tilt towards and make sense of, together. But it _was_ new, and the anticipatory thrill of that concept started to make Aziraphale feel a little wild, a little desperate, his skin alighting with excitement at the idea of a whole new unexplored territory of _feeling_ that might, finally, be discovered. If only he knew what to do about it. 

\---

The restlessness began on a Monday. 

It had crept over Aziraphale in a prickly, pins-and-needles sensation that manifested in the form of an absolutely repellent and confusing desire to do something like _go running_ (unconscionable) but otherwise just sat there, humming like a magnetic charge under his skin, twanging and tugging and threatening to pull him apart, like there was something there that couldn’t be contained, like he was going to separate into parts and unravel into nothing.

In the olden days, Aziraphale would have channelled the feeling into apparitions in dark alleys and winding dirt-path roads, setting himself alight and pulsing lightning through the places where the connective tissue of him was the weakest and thinnest, amplifying his voice into a boom of rock-shattering terror, vibrating almost to the point of dissolution, frightening the poor sod he’d appeared in front of into grovelling nose-first in the sand, until Aziraphale felt like he had expended enough miraculous energy that he could retract, like a suddenly-nervous pangolin, back into the solid shell of himself, an ordinary body once more.

There was less call for that kind of showbusiness these days. Aziraphale was also keen to keep eyes, Heavenly or otherwise, away from himself as much as possible. Now, when he started to feel those jitters, he became compulsive, fiddly, restless, moving relentlessly, touching fitfully, like if he just kept knocking and bumping into things, trying to maintain a sense of his own corporation, he might stop feeling like he was going to come apart.

He kept thinking of his tattoo, of the buzz of the needle and the painful thrum, central and focused, drawing the livewires of himself back together. He kept thinking about Crowley’s fingers around his wrists, the grounding feeling of it, a conductor for the electricity, keeping him together.

It was a strange, dizzying, off-kiltering feeling, the way a space inside him that had always been there had only just made itself known, coming to the realisation now of how it wanted to be filled.

On this evening of particular restlessness, Aziraphale had taken to arranging and rearranging his whole book collection; first alphabetically by surname and subcategorised by genre, then he had pulled everything out into piles on the floor, only to slot them back on the shelf reverse-chronologically by publishing date, cross-categorised by the book jacket’s colour. After an hour of fussing and huffing over the heavier and dustier tomes that caused little mote-spirals in the air every time he shifted them, Crowley eventually raised his head and said, “ _Aziraphale._ ”

Aziraphale paused, his hand on a first edition Thomas Hardy in emerald green. “Yes?”

“Come here.”

“But I haven’t finished—” Aziraphale protested.

“You’re fretting. It’s driving me mad.”

Aziraphale put the book down. He didn’t much want to sit still. He had the bizarre feeling like his skin was starting to go transparent, like he was losing the sensation in his limbs.

“Come on,” Crowley said. “Please.”

It was the _please_ that did it. Aziraphale owed Crowley a good many apologies for the number of times he’d said _no_ to Crowley when he should have said _yes_ , on matters of the gravest importance, and there was something in Crowley’s tone that suggested, maybe, this was a matter of grave importance, too.

He went and sat on the sofa next to Crowley, expectant, waiting, but he could feel the indecision and uncertainty coming off Crowley in waves, could see the taut flicker of a twitching muscle in Crowley’s jaw, like he was biting the inside of his cheek, thinking. Aziraphale started to tap his foot, shaking his leg up and down, but then without request or explanation, Crowley put one hand on Aziraphale’s thigh to still him, then put another arm around his back, and pulled.

Aziraphale resisted a moment, confused, but as he felt the insistence in Crowley’s grip, he followed the movement down, guided to rest down on his side, bringing his knees up to lie, curled like a comma, with his head on Crowley’s lap.

“There,” said Crowley, decisively, like he’d concluded a conversation they hadn’t even had yet, though he sounded less sure of himself, and more like he was trying to sound convincing. But Aziraphale very quietly said nothing, for once, lest he disrupt what was unfolding between them here; certain or uncertain, it made Aziraphale feel calm and grounded, no longer like he was transcending his own skin. He was back in his body, could feel the edges of his own shape where they pressed back against Crowley instead of thin air. It quelled the strange, aggressive vibrations in him that made him feel like a loose, spinning thing set wild in the gaping maw of the universe.

He sighed, content, and was surprised to hear the tremble in his own breath, his body responding with a rush of emotion to the feel of Crowley’s hand inching higher on his neck, his shoulders flexing to guide the shivery knot in his shoulderblades down his spine to spread out over his back.

They were quiet, a moment, Crowley’s fingers rubbing the tight curls at Aziraphale’s hairline. There was a hot-cold pulse of anticipation in Aziraphale’s chest, thrumming out to his limbs, leaving him feeling strangely weak. There was something he wanted to ask. Something he needed to ask. He was right on the edge of it, of the split in time between unsaid and said, suspended.

Crowley, historically, had been the one to make moves, to make bold suggestions, to be clear when it mattered, while Aziraphale had, shamefully, spent most of his years with Crowley obfuscating, lying, tricking, deceiving, and manipulating. Looking at his track record, Aziraphale often felt more demon than the demon himself. He had rarely said what he really meant, hiding his fears and his feelings in coded words and ridiculously contrived plans, hoping to draw Crowley closer to him without ever having to be honest about what he wanted.

“Crowley,” he said, and his heartbeat hammered so hard it fluttered up into his throat. “Would you want to kiss me?”

Crowley’s hand stilled in Aziraphale’s hair. There was silence, and Aziraphale was suddenly afraid he’d horribly miscalculated, when Crowley cleared his throat and said, strained, “Would _you_ want to kiss _me_?”

Aziraphale sat up, and turned to face Crowley. “That isn’t an answer. And I asked first.”

Crowley’s cheeks were rather red, fetchingly, and his eyes darted down and away from Aziraphale’s gaze. “Well yours isn’t an answer either. And asking _first_ isn’t legally binding, I think you’ll find.”

“You’re being remarkably difficult.”

“If my being difficult bothered you so much you wouldn’t want to kiss me.”

“Well, you’ve answered your own question, then,” Aziraphale said, with a bright feeling of giddy relief. “So now you can answer mine.”

Crowley’s eyes flicked up, then down again, a stumble in the vicinity of Aziraphale’s mouth before it dropped to his own lap. “Yes,” he said, quiet and hoarse.

So Aziraphale kissed him.

The sensation was unremarkable at first, a touch like any other they had shared in gentleness, a skin-to-skin joining that left only the slightest whisper of air between them, a stream of warmth from Crowley’s mouth to his – but it was this breath that made it remarkable. A movement of molecules from one place to another, Crowley breathing out as Aziraphale breathed in, the transfer of oxygen, filling his lungs.

Then Aziraphale opened his mouth wider, curious and seeking. His tongue followed into the space, a smooth slide across Crowley’s bottom lip, up over his top lip, running along the points of his canines, finding the hard and soft edges of this entrance into his body, exploring the textures, and finally ran down to press into the flat of Crowley’s own waiting tongue.

Crowley let out a sound, a tremor running through him that felt to Aziraphale as if it also travelled up his own spine. He pressed his hands onto the flat of Crowley’s back to pull them in together, and the line of warmth and longing that was made between them singed the surface of Aziraphale’s skin under the rough-soft shift of his clothes.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, pulling their mouths apart and marvelling at the residual ghost-touches he still felt where his lips were soft and wetted. His voice shook a little. “I should like to do a little more of this.”

“Of – the kissing?” Crowley’s eyes were half-shut and drunken-looking, but they darted feverishly under lowered lids across Aziraphale’s face and to his mouth.

“Of everything, if you’d like.” Aziraphale put his hands to his own collar, and unbuttoned the first three there. The sensation of air hitting newly-exposed skin, even in a place as innocuous as his neck, made Aziraphale shudder. How badly he wanted Crowley’s hand there. How badly he wanted Crowley’s hands all over him, to follow the contours of his whole body, to bring him into being through his touch.

And then Crowley, as if he’d caught whatever was coming off Aziraphale in staggering, needful waves, pressed in with his lips to the bare space of neck Aziraphale had uncovered for him, his mouth a damp ring against soft skin. He pushed his tongue softly forward, the rough-wet flat of it on Aziraphale’s pulse.

“ _Lord_ ,” Aziraphale said, and clutched his hands to Crowley’s shoulders. He felt vaguely delirious, the first fraying thread of a scarf unknitting, one tug enough to undo him entirely. He wanted-- It wasn't specific, nothing he could describe or ask for. He just _wanted_.

And somehow, Crowley gave it to him. With a sound that made Aziraphale’s knees weaken to water, Crowley licked and sucked at the space where his neck sloped to his collarbone, fingers moving with a wayward conviction towards the buttons of Aziraphale’s shirt, tugging to make them pop and slip from their fastenings, one by one, until Crowley had the space to slip his hand inside. His flattened palm pushed almost roughly until the shirt was hanging off one of Aziraphale’s shoulders, then it returned to Aziraphale’s chest, fingers flexing hard and digging in with sharp nails, scratching the soft give of flesh where his nightingale was etched.

Aziraphale let out a short, choked noise, and his own hands dug hard into Crowley’s arms, his body stuttering with a burst of responses. He stilled, heart beating wildly too, electric with desire. His body felt alive; vulnerable, malleable, raw – but powerful too, like it contained within itself the ability to reach the outer limits of sensation, to create its own supernovas.

“Sorry,” came Crowley’s blurred voice, hand slipping out of Aziraphale’s shirt. “Forgot that’s where it was.”

“No,” Aziraphale said, quickly, holding Crowley’s wrist, and guiding the hand back to his chest. “I – I like it.”

He didn’t have to say another word before Crowley was back on him, mouth kissing and sucking his collarbone, lips curling back to expose the blunt graze of teeth, hand roughly exploring the expanse of Aziraphale’s chest, tugging and pushing and pulling. When his fingers slipped and found the hard nub of Aziraphale’s nipple, he pinched, ungentle and demanding, and Aziraphale felt a strange, satisfying spring of tears come sharply up to his eyes.

“ _Oh_ ,” he said, and then let a moan through his gritted teeth as Crowley did it again, and Aziraphale knew, suddenly, with a rush like the hard gust of bellows expanding, what he wanted.

“What do you want?” Crowley said, against his skin, like an answer to Aziraphale’s silent call.

“I want—” Aziraphale stuttered over the phrasing, a tight, hiccupping feeling in his throat. He wondered if what he wanted would sound terribly crass, or somehow unfitting coming out of his mouth, whether it would ruin the atmosphere with its ridiculous bluntness. It was a base desire, a base request, and there was no other fitting euphemism for the raw simplicity of his need. He took a breath and said, “I want you to fuck me.”

Crowley stilled. “You do.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, and it didn’t feel like it had been the wrong thing to say at all. It was thrilling, not because it was illicit or wrong – that kind of shamefulness didn’t hold with Aziraphale – but because it felt like a skinned-open split of honesty, asking for something like that in such plain terms, and it made Aziraphale’s body sing with it. “If you’d be so kind.”

“Now that’s a word – _kind_ ,” Crowley said, pulling back an inch. His narrowed eyes were altogether knowing, and Aziraphale shuddered at their keenness. “Is it kindness you’re really after, with all the—?” Crowley trailed off, and instead reached over to take Aziraphale’s wrist once more in demonstration, squeezing against the bone.

“I don’t – _kindness_ is—” Aziraphale started, stuttering, overwhelmed. “I’m not asking you to be cruel. I know you love – you love me, and I love you too much to ask you to pretend otherwise.” The word, _love_ , expressed in other ways so many times over the years, felt delicious and ripe and sweet in his mouth, and he resolved to say it, again and again, for the way it made Crowley make a sound, now, warm and ferocious. But Crowley’s face was also hard-lined – not angry, but determined, needful in his own way and steeled against something hurting and cautious underneath. Aziraphale touched him, lightly. “I just want to – feel it,” he said, cheeks pinking. “And I mean, _really_ feel it. I don't want you to hold back.”

Crowley’s other hand encircled Aziraphale’s other wrist. He pulled, tight, and Aziraphale closed his eyes, not against the rush, but to fill his senses with it. It was a heady feeling, this _feeling_ , and if he weren’t already hard he would have stiffened in the space of a heartbeat. Crowley’s voice was hot and loaded with promise as he said, “Let’s go to the bedroom, and you can take your clothes off for me.”

Inside the bedroom, Aziraphale did as he was bid, layer by layer, piece by piece, undoing buttons and buckles and loosening ties, slipping his clothes off and away into a pile on the floor, until he was naked and bare to his feet. A soft draught from under the closed door alighted on the exposed surface of his skin, the coolness wrapping around him, making every hair raise and prickle and move with the air around it. His blood thumped, broiling and electrified in anticipation, sharp in his jugular and in his wrists. He could feel his breath move over his tongue and down into his lungs. He felt the oxygen push and distend his belly. His cock was hard and heavy between his legs. He was shaking.

“Angel,” Crowley said, and his voice was low, trembling. “You’re so—”

Aziraphale flexed his fingers, wanting to take hold of himself, but wanting more for Crowley to do it for him. “Crowley, please.”

Crowley slithered out of his own clothes as Aziraphale watched and waited, sweat misting in a hot-cold bloom across his skin, making him even more keenly aware of the sense and shape of his own body, a vibrating, raw-edged form.

“L-lie back on the bed,” Crowley said, stumbling only a little as he stood, matched to Aziraphale in his nakedness, a slender-thin thing emanating heat that Aziraphale turned to like the earth to the sun. “And – and spread your legs.”

Aziraphale let out a sound, dizzied and strung, a medley of sweet-sharp sensations in his head, echoed low in his belly, hot in his spine, in the join of his legs. He lay back, head leaned-to on the pillows piled up on the headboard, and he let his thighs fall open. Looking down between them, past the curve of his cock, flushed and leaking, was Crowley, looking back at him.

Crowley got on his knees in the space between Aziraphale’s legs. Kneeling, but not in supplication. His spine was rigid, and his hands folded finger by finger into the bony divots of Aziraphale’s knees, pressing with intent, pulling Aziraphale wider. Aziraphale felt the spreading motion tug at his muscles, joints and tendons unused to the position, singing like a plucked guitar string. It left him prone, wide open, and he felt the tense pucker of his arsehole clench in anticipation.

“You want this,” Crowley said, and though it wasn’t a question, there was something imploring in his gaze, a wildness in the cast of his eyes looking for confirmation, for direction.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, and it came out cracked in the middle, halfway a whine. “Yes, I want you to fuck me, please Crowley, as hard as – as hard as you can.” And then, because of the way Crowley shuddered, eyes clenching closed and spine bowing as if Aziraphale had just touched something in the centre of him, he added, in a sudden rush, “Make me feel good, I want it, I want _you_ to make it good for me.”

“A-angel,” Crowley said, a helpless sound, and then he reached down to his own cock, fisted it to slickness so it was wet and dripping, and then put his fingers, slick too, to Aziraphale’s hole, and pressed.

“Oh,” Aziraphale breathed. “Yes, _yes_.” He flexed his thighs, pushing up off the bed slightly, tilting his pelvis towards Crowley, chasing the sensation.

Crowley’s fingers circled, soft for a moment, but when Aziraphale thrust up again, whining, he leaned forward, between Aziraphale’s thighs, and lay one, long, limber arm across Aziraphale’s hips. “Stay still,” he said, voice cracking, and pressed down.

“Oh!” Aziraphale exclaimed again, and closed his eyes, struggling not to shout aloud. Crowley’s forearm was firm across his hipbones, pushing down into the swell of his belly, preternatural strength pinning him bodily to the bed, a long, steely line of immovable sensation across him. And then Crowley’s finger below breached him, and he moaned.

“Good?” Crowley asked, finger curving up into Aziraphale’s clenching heat. A second slid in beside the first, making a twisting, screwing motion that rolled Aziraphale’s eyes into his head, leaving him gasping.

“Y-yes,” Aziraphale gritted out, a gathering whiteness already at the edge of his vision.

Crowley’s long, nimble fingers crooked and rubbed, seeking, until it hit the nub of nerves that made Aziraphale sob out a moan, trying to jerk his body closer, harder, into the sensation.

“No,” Crowley said, and he leaned forward again, pushing the whole force of his bodyweight down in his arm across Aziraphale’s hips, the hard point of Crowley’s elbow connecting with bruising force to Aziraphale’s hipbone, a hard ache that made his spine feel hot and liquid. And then Crowley screwed his fingers in deep, fucking Aziraphale with them, rubbing with a relentless force at the swell of his prostate, until Aziraphale was shouting, trying to buck up but held down, forced to ride the sensation, sobbing and choking as he came all too fast, all over himself.

“Oh – _oh_ ,” Aziraphale moaned out, feeling every muscle inside him clench and release, jellified and trembling, a soft soreness coursing through him that was exquisite. Crowley’s fingers were still inside him, rigid and unyielding and making the ring of Aziraphale’s arsehole clench in interrupted pulses, a feeling which sparked the nerves in his still-twitching cock. It was good – it was an incredible feeling, but there was something below the floating ecstasy of arousal and the soft heat of the aftershocks; a dark and cavernous craving, that still ached. “More,” he whispered.

Crowley’s fingers stilled. “What was that?”

“More,” Aziraphale said again. “Please Crowley, I need—” He felt a breath stutter its way up his throat, hot and raw and almost tearful.

Crowley swallowed, a visible flex to his throat, which was flushed down to his chest. Between his legs, his prick stood, hard and ready. “Yes, alright,” he said. He pulled his fingers out and moved away slightly. Aziraphale immediately felt as if he were about to rise up off the bed, without Crowley holding him down, and he gasped at the loss of contact, the shuddering, unspooling feeling of the parts of him unjoining, membranes splintering, bones misaligning, skin disappearing.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, desperately, hands reaching out, grabbing. “Now, _now_ , please.”

And Crowley, without hesitation, crawled forward over Aziraphale, bracketing him in with his long, serpentine limbs, hard knees indenting the soft flesh of Aziraphale’s thighs, hard prick pressed into Aziraphale’s belly, elbows leaned up to butt into the slope of Aziraphale’s upper arms, hands gripping Aziraphale’s shoulders, ten hard points pushing into the join of his shoulderblades. And then he leaned in, and took Aziraphale’s mouth in a ferocious, biting kiss.

Aziraphale moaned into it, spine curving up to press every part that could reach into the hard, lean line of Crowley’s sinewed shape, raising his thighs to squeeze Crowley’s jagged-sharp hipbones, pressing harder to feel the jut of them bury grooves into his flesh, hands going up and around Crowley’s waist, holding the living, muscular solidity of him in his arms, folding over Crowley’s back to pull him close, as close as he could.

Crowley’s kiss was wet, open, claiming, tongue licking into Aziraphale’s giving mouth, biting and sucking at his lips, panting and sending trembling, subvocal sounds travelling between them. And then he was whispering against Aziraphale’s mouth, heated and desperate, “I’ll f-fuck you if that's what you want, I’ll fuck you, tell me – tell me you w-want it.”

“Yes, I want it, I want it,” Aziraphale whispered back, hushed, words half-swallowed by Crowley’s tongue still licking and sucking at his mouth. “Fuck me, _fuck_ me, make me feel it.”

With one fumbling hand, Crowley reached down between them, fingers brushing at Aziraphale’s cock, still stiff and flushed wet and slick with sweat and come, and Aziraphale bucked and moaned, then moaned again when his bucking was met with the resistance of Crowley’s weight lain across him, an inexorable pushback that he could feel at every point where they touched, skin-to-skin.

And then Crowley’s hand slipped to his own cock, a hot, hard line in the join of Aziraphale’s thighs, and Aziraphale pulled his legs apart as wide as he could, to the point where they ached, trembling, opening himself up for Crowley’s guiding hand, as he lined up his cock and pushed in.

The first catch of Crowley’s cock on Aziraphale’s hole was like the flare of a lighter sparking to life, the swollen head against his rim, a hot, focused sensation that blacked out every other sense in Aziraphale’s body. Then, Crowley’s cock pushed in, slow, relentless, and the ungiving stiff heat of it, the hard-smooth thickness that split him, made Aziraphale cry out in desperate pleasure.

“Yes, yes, _yes_ ,” he babbled, fingers slipping clumsily at the pooling sweat slipping into the valley of Crowley’s back, the dipping curve of his spine created by the bowed thrusting of his hips, fucking hard into Aziraphale. “Oh, more, more, _please_.” He didn’t know what _more_ meant, only that he was chasing something, a light on the horizon, something to fill him with heat, something that eluded him, big and needful and _necessary_.

“M-more?” Crowley asked, breathless, hips pressing in with a hard grind that made sparks blink into existence like newborn stars behind Aziraphale’s eyes.

“More,” Aziraphale moaned, thrusting back up to meet Crowley, to get Crowley’s cock hitting that spot inside him over and over. And then, with a cry, senseless, as a hard thrust jolted through to his spine, “Make it _hurt_.”

Crowley stilled. He stared at Aziraphale, and they were nose to nose, breathing heavy, wrapped up and clinging to each other, trading breaths and heartbeats, wet and heated and sore with friction and muscle ache, and Crowley was inside him, and Aziraphale had never felt so connected to his own body, so present and alive and existent.

He also felt, suddenly, terribly, terribly in love.

“I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to,” Aziraphale said, quiet, on a breath, barely a whisper.

Crowley closed his eyes, briefly, then blinked them open, and close as they were, they were impenetrable for a moment. “I want—” he said. “I want to – to give you what you want.” And then his expression turned open, vulnerable. “Whatever you want.”

Aziraphale felt a swell of emotion, watery with the softness of his feelings, all the way up his throat and to the back of his eyes, which filled, and almost spilled as his face creased into a smile. “I want this. I want you. I want your hands on me.” Aziraphale slipped his own hands from the dip of Crowley’s back, down over his shoulders, his forearms, travelling to the tips of Crowley’s fingers, and then tugging, gently, to rearrange them so that they were pressed against Aziraphale’s chest, palm hot against the picture of the nightingale. “I don’t want you to worry about hurting me like this.” He rolled his hips, and Crowley’s cock moved inside him. “I want to feel you.” And then he raised a hand, lifting his fingers up to trace Crowley’s lips, gentle pressure on them until they parted, past the resistance of his teeth, crooking his fingers over the points of Crowley’s lower incisors. “I want you to bite.”

“Literally?” Crowley said, muffled around Aziraphale’s fingers.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, letting out a small laugh that turned to a gasp as he felt the shift of Crowley’s cock inside him. “ _Yes_ ,” he said again, more strongly. “I like it that way.”

“Alright,” Crowley said again, thickly, and closed his mouth and sucked Aziraphale’s fingers in, closing his teeth gently around the intrusion to bite down, at the join of Aziraphale’s knuckles. Then he let the fingers slip out with a wet sound that made Aziraphale’s breath stutter, and kissed the inside of Aziraphale’s wrist. “Turn over,” Crowley said.

Feeling leaden in his limbs, muscles tense and shaking, Aziraphale did as he was told once more, turning over onto his hands and knees, head bowed. He felt Crowley knock his knees apart, and he spread his thighs again, the back of them aching with emerging bruises where Crowley had gripped him. And then Crowley’s hand was on his back, pushing down, and Aziraphale folded onto his elbows, arms crossed in front of him, sweaty forehead against the back of his hands. His spine bowed, and his arse, already sore and clutching, was raised, waiting. “Crowley,” he mumbled, a thick-smeared sound where his mouth was mushed against his own knuckles. His cock was heavy between his legs, and he felt a great weight throughout his whole self, like he was drunk and full of food and sleepy at the same time.

“I’m here, angel,” Crowley said, into the back of his neck, and then he threaded his fingers into Aziraphale’s curl-soft hair, clenching a handful of it as his fingernails scratched a sharp spark of sensation against Aziraphale’s scalp. Aziraphale shuddered from it, distracted, and Crowley chose that moment to line himself up once more and slide in, a hard and brutal shove that made Aziraphale cry out as Crowley’s hips slammed into him.

“ _Yes_ ,” Aziraphale gasped, and then tailed off into a wordless whine as Crowley pulled hard on his hair, a rough, stinging tug that made his eyes water, made his cock jerk, wracked his whole body with a shiver that made him clench down, and he heard Crowley’s answering moan.

“F-feels – s-so good – Aziraphale—”

“I know, I _know_ ,” Aziraphale slurred, though his words were lost and muffled as Crowley shoved at him, rocking him forwards and pushing his face deep into the pillow where his hands were crossed over his mouth - and breathing was optional but it was still being squeezed out of Aziraphale in hard, thrusting increments until he could feel a burning in his lungs and the caramel-thick sluice of blood slowing in his limbs, leaving them prickling and numb. It was good, it was so good, the mix of sensations, the bright sparks of pain inside the hot-thick bed of pleasure like crystal sugar on a soft bun.

And then Crowley groaned, hips speeding up, and his hands slipped from Aziraphale’s hair to grip Aziraphale's shoulders, nails digging crescent moons, sharp enough to draw blood, and Aziraphale was viciously, euphorically pleased, imagining the marks that would be felt there. Crowley stretched over Aziraphale, mouth hot and open over the top notch of his spine, and he muttered as he jerked, “I won’t – I won’t last m-much longer, Aziraphale, I’m going – I’m g-going to—”

“Inside,” Aziraphale groaned, “inside me, please, _please_.”

And Crowley came, a rush of heat inside the wet stretch of him, and Aziraphale could feel it, slick and warm, the pulse of the stiff cock inside him, and he felt suddenly wild and desperate, overloaded on sensation, an inventory of feeling flashing like rapid lines of static across his brain, from the wet feeling of his own thin breath suffocating in his throat, to the filthy-slick warmth inside his arse, to the twitching, electric tension across his skin all the way to his toes. It was so much, it was too much, the ache and the soreness and the sharpness, and his prick was red and stiff and swollen and leaking steadily, making a mess of the sheets beneath him as it dragged sticky against the bed.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale choked. He felt both outside of his body and thoroughly trapped inside it.

“I’ve got you,” Crowley murmured, and his words were reassuring but his voice was wrecked and raw. He pulled out slowly with a wet, obscene sound, leaving Aziraphale feeling strangely hollow, but with deft and dextrous hands, he helped Aziraphale turn back over, arranging him on his back against the pillows.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said again, blinking, drunk-feeling, tearful.

Crowley didn’t tease. He leaned forward, and placed his parted lips over Aziraphale’s nightingale. Then he reached down and took Aziraphale’s cock in hand, and exposed his teeth to bite down hard, right there, over the tattoo.

With a burst of overwhelming sensation, Aziraphale wailed and bucked and came, hard, his prick jerking in Crowley’s hand, spurting wet-hot over his own belly, chest arching into the sharp points of Crowley’s teeth as they drove into his flesh with bruising force, the muscles in his arse and thighs clenching and trembling, eyes rolled back, overcome.

There was silence as they breathed, holding onto each other.

In the valley of the aftermath, Aziraphale felt his skin shuddering with goosebumps. He dragged the heavy weight of his arms up over his own chest to loop around Crowley’s neck where he was still face down in the vicinity of his collarbones. Crowley’s own arms went around Aziraphale’s shoulders, squeezing in between his body and the mattress, to clutch at him, erratic breathing slowing to a gradual stillness.

When he felt like he could speak around the fullness of the feeling in his throat, Aziraphale leaned down to plant a kiss on Crowley’s head, on top of his finger-mussed hair, and said, “Thank you, my dear.”

“Anytime,” came Crowley’s reply, a little dazed and blurry where his lips pressed to Aziraphale’s chin. Aziraphale felt Crowley’s voice resonate into his own chest like it was a physical part of him, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the prickle of rising emotion that threatened to make him teary again.

Crowley cocked his head up. “Everything alright, angel?”

Aziraphale made a small, content sound in his throat. Every part of him felt stretched and warm and used, and good in a way he was cautiously sure he’d never felt before, during his long, long tenure on this planet. There continued to be wonderful, beautifully surprising things for him to experience on earth, and he felt incomparably blessed and grateful for it. “Yes. Rather good, I think. And you?”

“Sleepy,” Crowley said, and true enough his voice was thick and lethargic. “Not sure wh-wh—” he let out a jaw-cracking yawn halfway through the word. “ _Why_. It’s not even night-time yet.” And then his voice was soft, and sounded sort of pleased. “It’s good, though.”

“It is,” Aziraphale said, drowsy now himself, all the more for the low rumble of Crowley’s voice lulling him, and the way their chests pressed together, moving in and out in a rhythm that felt gentle and hypnotic.

“I like it, by the way,” Crowley said, after a few moments of the quietness padding in around them. His hand flopped up clumsily to land on Aziraphale’s left side, over his tattoo. “This.”

“Hm?” Aziraphale cracked open a heavy eyelid, thinking about miracling away the mess still all over his belly and thighs. He looked down to where Crowley’s fingers had softly started to trace the edge of his nightingale. “Oh,” he said, and felt such happiness he wondered if it might actually crack through him in literal beams of light.

“I didn’t say it before. But it’s – nice.” Crowley cleared his throat, then, grumbling slightly. “You’re a ridiculous romantic.”

“I am,” Aziraphale said, pleased. He reached up and took Crowley’s hand, linking their fingers together over his chest. His other hand came to rest on the back of Crowley’s neck, on the smooth dip of the pulse-point under his ear. He could feel the crossfade of their heartbeats, a kickdrum inside himself, and the jump of Crowley’s pulse under his fingers. He smiled at the feeling, at the deep, grounding rhythm.

They fell asleep that way, hearts beating, under the nightingale’s wings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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